Ask HN: What accounting software do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What accounting software do you use?

35 pointsmatttah64 comments

Right now we're on Gnucash which works pretty well for us, however I'm thinking about possibly moving to a web based accounting system (just so it is easier to access, etc.).

What are you using for your business and why?

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"thinking about possibly moving to a web based accounting system"

If moving the opposite direction is an option:

http://www.ledger-cli.org/

If you're here, you already know all about programming/text editors, and storing files in a backed up git (or similar) repo... And again, if you're here, and you later need to export, writing a text parser/convertor for ledger-format into "whatever" is not going to be a challenge.

Another alternative is I'm the treasurer for a very small (like 5 figures annual cashflow) non-tech volunteer organization and by policy we "have to" use google drive spreadsheets... someone else is hosting, I can upload scanned paper documents and PDF format statements, easy to share both RW and RO access, easy enough to backup, the spreadsheets are simple enough for non-accountants to understand but detailed enough to keep the real accountants in the parent org happy...

I use ledger as the treasurer of a small nonprofit with similar cash flow, and it works great. I keep the files in a git repository. Next I am going to automate some of the bookkeeping based on PayPal and Stripe transactions.

Exactly the same. I used it as a treasurer in a small nonprofit. Worked great for me. The problem is when it comes to transitioning the books to a new treasurer. Nobody else but another command-line afficionado will want to have anything to do with ledger, so you're dealing with some kind of data migration at that point.

Edit: Meant this as a response to sibling comment by guan.

I'm a big fan of ledger as well. I wrote a series of articles about how I use it[1], which is not exactly how others use it but it works very well for me.

[1]: https://www.petekeen.net/ledger

I use freshbooks but mostly just for invoicing clients. I understand they have more advanced accounting features that I don't have a need for since it's just me doing solo consulting.

Using freshbooks for years now and love it. Not because it has lots of features etc, but simply because it does this invoicing thing quite well. They are starting to add more accounting specific features which is nice but for me the bread and butter of invoicing is well worth the 20/month

Contractor here, too. I've been using FreshBooks to do all my invoicing for the last few years. I have an accountant who handles my taxes so when they added the basic accounting features, that was enough to get me off of the online accounting software I was using. It syncs with my bank, allows me to categorize expenses, and then spits out the requisite reports. As a plus, the accounting software I was using was more expensive than my FreshBooks account, so I feel like I'm getting a great deal. This already sounds like an ad, so I'll stop here. Really, just a happy customer.

My best online accounting experience so far has been with Xero. Xero has pretty good bank and payroll feed integration, good customizable tracking classes, and it's geared towards the small business user. It ends up being a little pricier than buying a prior year desktop version of QuickBooks but it seems to be the best online package and they're actually pushing and working to make accounting easier vs. QuickBooks online which has just been a poor version of their desktop software.

There are lots of tradeoffs but it mostly comes down to 1. bookkeeping skill/comfort level and 2. budget. A good third thing to consider is whether you'll need to get your data to an accountant and if so, can you do this in a format that will be usable by them.

I haven't seen the QB online refresh yet so that might have improved.

I used Wave as recently as a year ago (had a client using it) and it was frustrating to pull any sort of meaningful reporting from and it lacked some functionality.

Seconding Xero. The freshly released Stripe integration has sealed my decision to park my invoicing and time tracking there, instead of trying to manage 2 or 3 different apps.

Xero is really good. Really useful if you arn't just doing simple accounting (for simple, non-double ledger accounting, I used to use FreshBooks).

My company decided to eat-what-we-were selling/telling customers to do and went 100% cloud (google apps + xero), it's been awesome.

We still use QB for payroll, planning on moving to ADP (or something else) soon.

I haven't tested it out yet but ADP supposedly integrates tightly with Xero and will auto import once you've mapped the correct accounts.

Been using QBO the past two days for a client. One more pro for Xero vs. QBO is that Xero lets you open things in new tabs so you can have multiple reports open. QBO doesn't seem to let you do this and it's time consuming to keep re-running reports.

I do all accounting and payroll. Recently switched from QuickBooks Mac (for accounting) and by-hand calculations (for payroll) over to QuickBooks Online. Overall, QBO is nice and is inexpensive considering the time-savings (e.g. payroll services and importing from bank). However, there are some pretty obvious items that once the trigger is pulled requires a help desk call for level two support to resolve. Little quirky things like trying to change a bank account that a paystub came from. I've had three such occasions over the last two months.

Oh yeah, to leverage Turbotax in which you can import your QuickBooks database... it requires (currently) installing a Windows version of Quickbooks, exporting your online database, etc, etc. Like QBM, QBO is also teated as a red-headed step child when compared to QBW.

For tracking sales and producing/maintaining invoices properly, a custom webapp (which also takes and reconciles payments for said sales). For "book keeping" everything together (sales, expenses, payroll, etc.) to give to the accountant at year end, Excel(!)

Why? We're a UK business that mostly deals in USD and after spending quite some time researching 3 years ago, we couldn't find anything Web-based that could deal with all of the technicalities of multi-currency accounts, strict VAT invoice specs (particularly involving alternative currencies), and arcane VAT rules (reverse charging, EU sales lists, digital content sales, etc.) I believe there are a couple of systems that'll do it all now but we'd already developed our stuff before they caught up..

A few years back I got frustrated with Quickbooks, and signed up for Outright because it was SAAS and brought in all my accounts automatically, but it languished then got bought by Godaddy who turned it into the equally-stunted Godaddy Bookkeeping. I haven't had time or energy to move it away. Basically lesson learned - be careful what you sign up for in this space, vendor lock-in is the name of the game with accounting software so whatever you choose, expect it to be at the center of your bookkeeping for the next few years.

That said, I'm thinking about moving to Xero as I heard its pretty decent..

I use hledger and hledger-web. It's mostly compatible with ledger with some nice features on top and a web interface.

Before that tried Gnucash, but that was just hassle to use, while pure ledger was not user friendly enough for me.

Use whatever will work best with your accountant. Unless you are an accountant yourself and that's your function at your company my standard advise is to stop trying to micro-manage everything and move accounting off your desk as quickly as possible. Focus on your product.

Most accountants in the US are setup to ingest from and work with tools like Quickbooks. If you use a tool that provides a low impedance path for your accountant it will make your life a million times easier.

Do. Not. Reinvent. The. Wheel.

Exactly this.

Reinventing the wheel in this case is really risky. Screwing up accounting is a sure fire way to get into trouble. Don't take unnecessary risks when you don't have to.

I use an accountant. Although I'm a one-man shop, taxes and regulations are quite complex here in France and it's much better to have a specialist deal with it.

same here - it costs more than an app, but less time wise, and I worry less about doing something wrong or forgetting about some new regulation or optimization.

In my opinion, once you know enough about accounting, it's the perfect thing to delegate.

(obviously trust but verify)

I use traditional QuickBooks, but I hate it. Problem is switching cost is too high at the moment (when isn't it though).

I'm happy to see that most others aren't using it. It's really a miserable piece of software and is a full 10 years behind in terms of design and UX.

I've heard wonderful things about Xero. Haven't moved yet but that would likely be my pick if starting from scratch today.

Edit: This is for a non-tech business. Few thousand transactions per month, mostly CC.

http://www.freeagent.com Does all my budget and taxes.

Has anyone tried Crunch: http://www.crunch.co.uk/ ?

What appeals to me is that they are your accountant too, and seem geared to handling single person UK limited companies and the tax implications.

The downside is they aren't as big as Xero etc. so it isn't clear to me they aren't a bunch of cowboys. Has anyone used them?

Similarly, can anyone recommend Saasy: http://www.saasy.com ?

They're a payment provider not accounting software but what appeals to me is that Saasy acts as a reseller and so handles all VAT. As I understand it, which isn't very much, as a UK based company I would need to handle all the wacky VAT jurisdictions and invoice requirements of Europe, on top of submitting VAT to HMRC.

On the other hand, 8%...

How are y'all handling tax with your accounting software?

I have recently switched to crunch. So far so good. Setup is pretty painless if you wait until a new financial year. Only downside I see so far is that the accountant is more like 3rd line support. The online software is pretty straight forward though and it displays your current tax liabilities in real time. I recommend signing up for a free demo.

A combination of FreeAgent and a human accountant. I love FreeAgent, the workflow is dead simple - import transactions (automatically), explain them, occasionally get prompted to run payroll or submit a tax return. It doesn't support some esoteric stuff in the UK (e.g. National Insurance holiday).

I've run previous companies off custom spreadsheets and experience an almost constant low-level stress from that. FreeAgent makes it easy to get stuff right first time, our accountant has a login, and it takes basically no time to keep things completely up-to-date. I imagine Xero has a similar feature set. Whichever software you choose, I'd look for something that optimises that 'import transactions, explain transactions, submit correct returns' loop so you never have niggling feelings of being behind.

I'm in the UK and use Kashflow (http://www.kashflow.com/ or http://bit.ly/kashflow if you're feeling affiliate-link-friendly) -- it's been rock-solid and has plenty of hassle-reducing features beyond the usual invoicing and book-keeping stuff, including inbound online client payments and good VAT support with automated return submissions.

My accountant also has access and it makes that side of my business very very easy to manage.

They've recently dropped their prices (now £5/mth and up), but it should say something about KashFlow that I've been happy to pay the old price ( > £100/year) for it for the last three years.

May I ask you how much does your accountant charge for your annual returns/accounts?

We use Wave ( http://www.waveapps.com/ ) and are pretty happy with. Also, one bonus is that it's free, including if you have multiple companies. It also has bank feeds and pretty good multi-currency support.

Thanks for the tip! I will give this a try. We are also looking for something.

Do you use the payroll component of it?

(Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of Zoho Books) I invite you to try Zoho Books. It is a complete double entry accounting package that handles invoicing, online payments via Paypal, Stripe and others, Payables, Automatic bank feeds, sales and purchase orders and lots more. Furthermore, when you sign up for Zoho Books, you get instant access to over 25+ applications from Zoho.com

We recently launched a new version of Zoho Books with lot of enhancements. If all you need is an invoicing tool, we have Zoho Invoice. That lets you to invoice your clients, record expenses and include them in your invoices and get paid online.

Please give it a spin and let me know your feedback. You can reach me at prashant at zohocorp dot com

I use Quickbooks at the office but have used GnuCash for years for my personal finances and side businesses. Just a couple of days ago I decided to give Wave Accounting a try. It seems pretty simple to use. Almost too simple but I haven't really tried to do much reporting as I'm still in the middle of importing transactions. The javascript interface does seem a little slow when you're clearing a long list of transactions.

Just a first impression. I'm excited to start using something that my wife can access as well.

I'm importing just transactions starting January 1st. I imagine importing years worth of transactions would be difficult.

Actually looking at wave too right now! I don't see anyway though to do a bulk import of all accounts/transactions, are you doing it manually?

I'm only going back to 1/1 so I'm starting over. Pulling data from the banks. Definitely didn't see a way to do a bulk import of accounts. Looks like you can import csv of transactions. Not ideal if you're trying to pull in full history of your business.

In the UK and using Freeagent, it really is fantastic and does pretty much everything for you. From invoicing through to automatic bank reconciliation and tax returns, well worth the £20/m... saves me a ton of time.

We use QuickBooks Online. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the new redesign is pretty slick and catches QuickBooks back up with Xero. In the US, you're going to find more accountants/bookkeepers that are familiar with QuickBooks over Xero...which is very important if you're not an accounting expert (most of us). That being said, Xero is working hard to woo those accountants in the US. I'd recommend doing a trial of both QuickBooks Online and Xero and seeing which one feels the best, syncs with your bank accounts, and saves you the most time.

I'd really like to suggest my recently opened-source ERP project Stockor, but it's not quite there yet accounting wise.

While it does have a full double-entry accounting system inside it, it's not fully exposed to the user right now.

It currently does purchase orders, invoicing, and writing checks just fine. It's just a bit opaque on creating ad-hoc GL postings and modifying the balance statement.

If you're not in a huge hurry, check out stockor.org in 3-6 months :) Contact me if you have further questions or would like to beta test some stuff.

Full disclosure, I work for Kashoo, but yeah... Kashoo. Super-useful for iPad-toting entrepreneurs. http://appstore.com/kashooaccounting Double-entry accounting (aka, makes your accountant - and god forbid - the gov happy)... but still easy to use (fresh for iOS7). Again, full disc: I'm a Kashoo'er.

Quickbooks online.

We use an accountant, and occasionally a bookkeeper. We’re based in New Mexico, and all of the local accountants said it was Quickbooks or Quickbooks online :-) And it’s proven to make getting help with the books pretty easy. Of course I hate it (but with some automation and help) I never have to touch it either.

I'm using BudgetInMind from softurion.com for my personal accounting. It works on Mac and is very powerful. It uses double-entry accounting principles, so I can get all my spending and assets in one place, with multiple currencies which I need (since I've accounts in different currencies).

We use xero and it's made accounting enjoyable for me, and usually I resent spending time on accounts. We needed something that would handle multiple currencies well and so far that has been no problem. Being web based really helps too, especially as you get multiple users with no hassle.

Quick books online just did a massive design refresh it's actually very nice and usable. I recommend it.

https://www.waveapps.com/

I'm using http://debitoor.com (I'ma developer on the 40-50 person debitoor team) I used to use e-conomic.com. But now debitoor has everything i need for my 1 person company.

I love this topic. It's been a sticking point with me for the last year.

I'm currently on Wave - and have been for nearly three years. Prior to that I used FreshBooks exclusively, pretty much since their establishment. I've used QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Xero, and Kashflow as recently as January, importing sample data into each, messing around, etc. Equally, I send my financials to an accountant.

First off - I don't ever integrate my bank accounts with the online services. Banking is insecure enough, that integrating it with a third party terrifies me. I'm not having to extend my trust - and it's just not something I'm willing to do with real access to my financials.

QuickBooks - In order to get what I'm getting for free from Wave, I had to upgrade to the $39/month package (Canada). I needed support for multiple businesses, and I needed invoices that didn't look like complete tripe. Receipt integration was not fantastic. Basically I found QuickBooks to be expensive and not useable.

FreshBooks - it's great at invoicing, but it pretty much falls down at everything else. I really wanted time-tracking integration (Toggl!) but it was pretty poor. I wanted expense integration with receipt scanning systems (Shoeboxed!) but eventually gave up, it just wasn't there.

Kashflow - it was okay, not great, not bad.

Xero - It's great. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about it. But, it wasn't $30/month better than my Wave workflow. Now, if I was starting from scratch, I'd probably go Xero.

Wave - First off, it's free - that's huge. It integrated (past tense) with Shoeboxed, but then they developed their own Invoice Scanner/Importer. Immediately that saved me $100/year. More importantly, I've found Wave's actually 50% more accurate than ShoeBoxed since I've switched over.

Reporting in Wave stinks. There's no way to put it. I just export things to CSV and then yank them into Excel, it's faster, better, and more reliable. That being the case, it also takes seconds.

Now, I'm looking at thick-client software that runs on OSX and Linux. I'm looking into Moneydance, and GnuCash, though both seem to fail for me. iBank is the most promising, but it's OSX only unfortunately. I'm going to continue with cloud invoicing, because I want to know if anyone was "clicked on" the invoice link I send them. That's where all thick clients fail.

Just my $0.02. YMMV of course.

I don't use any accounting software, but FWIW I've had the chance to meet a lot of the folks at Wave a couple years back. They have a really solid team and their approach for providing a free product is one that really makes sense to me.

100%. I know a bunch of them - consider some friends, and love them. They're a great team all around... which is another reason I enjoy their software.

cik - would love to talk with you about Wave and your experience with it. If you wouldn't mind sharing your experience on it a bit more with me drop me a line at matt _at_ setfive.com.

Appreciate it!

Xero is great! - single username (email) lets me access multiple businesses. It's not perfect but 1,000 times better than Quickbooks or writing/maintaining your own. There is a $9.95/mo simple account

Less Accounting - LessAccounting.com - My accounant can use it pretty much just works - they have an actual bookkeeper help you with the setup (it took many hours in my case) and they are extremely helpful.

In .nl I use MoneyBird.nl to do simple invoicing (€10/month).

I use Yodlee. Mainly because there was a problem with Mint authentication for one of my accounts, and YNAB wasn't what I was looking for at the time.

YNAB. The UX is very nice, you get free courses, and there is a nice community around it. It's not an accounting but a budgeting software though.

QuickBooks Online. It's a much better tool than it was even two years ago, really glad we switched over to it and our accountants love it.

Can anyone recommend software that works for the German market (but also available in English), ideally that can integrate with Elster?

I use FreeAgent for my Zweigniederlassung. I export my bank transactions from Volksbank's web interface, convert the file with a script I wrote (https://github.com/airblade/volksbanker) and upload into FreeAgent.

FreeAgent doesn't integrate with Datev or anything like that. However my Steuerberater can log into my FreeAgent account and get all the book-keeping information he needs.

Http://debitoor.com

I use http://saasu.com (especially good for australian businesses)

http://www.runmyaccounts.ch/ (Switzerland only)

On that note, what software do you guys use to track company reimbursements and personal write offs?

Xero! It's really good.

Quickbooks Online.

FREEAGENT!

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